Laurence Henry Tribe (born October 10, 1941) is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. He also works with the firm Massey & Gail LLP on a variety of matters.[3]

Tribe is a liberal scholar of constitutional law.[4] He is the author of American Constitutional Law (1978), a treatise in that field, and has argued before the United States Supreme Court 36 times.[5] On May 22, 2013, he was presented with an honorary doctorate, Doctor of Letters, from Columbia University during the Class of 2013 commencement.[citation needed]

Tribe served as a law clerk to Mathew Tobriner on the California Supreme Court from 1966–67 and as a law clerk to Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1967–68. He joined the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor in 1968, receiving tenure in 1972. Among his distinguished law students and research assistants while on the faculty at Harvard have been Barack Obama (a research assistant for two years), Chief Justice John Roberts (as a law student in his classes), and Elena Kagan (as a research assistant).[9]

The Supreme Court ruled against Tribe's client in Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986 and held that a Georgia state law criminalizing sodomy, as applied to consensual acts between persons of the same sex, did not violate fundamental liberties under the principle of substantive due process. However, in 2003 the Supreme Court overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas, a case for which Tribe wrote the ACLU's amicus curiae brief supporting Lawrence, who was represented by Lambda Legal.

In 2004, Tribe acknowledged having plagiarized several specific phrases and a sentence in his 1985 book, God Save this Honorable Court, to a 1974 book by Henry Abraham.[10][11] After an investigation, Tribe was reprimanded by Harvard for "a significant lapse in proper academic practice" but concluded that Tribe's error was unintentional.[12]

Tribe described Justice Antonin Scalia's response and dissent to the 5-4 Windsor v. United States decision as "intemperate", "extraordinary", and "at the very least, an exercise in jurisprudential cynicism". He posited that Scalia appeared unable to resist "the temptation to use the occasion to insult the Court's majority, and Justice Kennedy in particular, in essentially ad hominem ...terms", to wit:

"[P]rincipally to highlight the extraordinary character of this particularly vitriolic and internally inconsistent dissent ... about how the Court should have decided the very controversy that he says wasn't really before it ... [For Scalia to] accuse the majority of arrogance and then reach the merits after saying that the Court lacks jurisdiction to address the case requires no small dose of chutzpah ... Scalia didn't so much as consider the possibility ... that considerations of federalism might point to a particularly rigorous examination of the purported justifications for a measure like Section 3. ... In predicting that the opinion joined by the five Justices comprising today's Windsor majority would invariably lead to the invalidation of state efforts to limit lawful marriage to opposite-sex couples, Justice Scalia was engaging in a bait-and-switch unworthy of so serious and smart a jurist, one who often displays a principled side that even those who dislike his results would be hard-pressed not to admire ...[19][20]

^Nancy Waring (Summer 1999). "Congratulations Dean Sullivan". Harvard Law Bulletin. Sullivan got her first taste of litigation as a 3L, working with Tribe on a U.S. Supreme Court brief in which the two asserted the right of Hare Krishnas to proselytize at the Minnesota State Fair. Recalling the fledgling attorney, Tribe says, 'Her sense of the most persuasive way to cast the issues and her rhetorical command were remarkable for any lawyer, much less a student. It was clear to me that I was dealing with the most extraordinary student I had ever had.'

^Developments since the Court's decision, however, appear to confirm Justice Scalia's judgment as largely correct. The Court's ambiguity surrounding the legal standard of review it chose to apply, in an attempt to leave the question of the constitutionality of state laws against same-sex marriage for another day, opened the door for federal judges around the country to strike down existing state marriage laws as unconstitutional (see below citations):